Nascar’s Mexico debut gets 2.1m viewers on Prime Video as F1 and IndyCar make major gains

• Penultimate race on Prime Video drew youngest Cup audience since 2017
• F1 averaging 1.4m viewers through ten races, the best figure at this mark on record
• IndyCar exceeds 1m viewers for three straight races for only third time since 2016

Nascar’s first points-paying Cup Series race outside of the US in the modern era averaged 2.1 million viewers on Amazon Prime Video.

While this figure is down on last season’s comparable weekend in Iowa, which averaged 2.69 million viewers on USA Network, it is an improvement on New Hampshire, which is the race that Mexico City replaced on the regular season schedule.

New Hampshire, which is now the fourth race of the Nascar playoffs, averaged 1.93 million viewers across the last five seasons.

With one race left this season in Prime Video’s five-race broadcast package, the streaming platform is averaging 2.16 million viewers. This is on a par with Nascar’s performance on USA Network, which has averaged 2.18 million viewers since it began to show the sport in 2022.

As well as overall viewership, Nascar is also interested in the average age of its audience on Prime Video. It will therefore be encouraged by the penultimate event in Prime Video’s package drawing the youngest audience for any Cup Series race since 2017.

Through four races, Prime Video’s average audience for Nascar is 56 years old, more than six years younger than the average age on linear networks (62.8 years old).

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Meanwhile, Formula One continues to deliver strong audience figures as 1.9 million viewers watched the race-only portion of the Canadian Grand Prix on ABC, an event record. The overall broadcast averaged 1.34 million viewers, according to figures released by Nascar.

Formula One is averaging 1.39 million viewers through the first ten races of the season, the series’ best performance at this mark on record.

IndyCar recorded the lowest viewership of the three series, but the average audience of 1.01 million viewers for Gateway on Fox was an whopping 95 per cent year-over-year (YoY) increase on last year’s viewership of 517,000.

However, Gateway – known as World Wide Technology Raceway for sponsorship reasons – took place far later in the 2024 season. A fairer comparison would be Road America, which averaged 863,000 viewers as the eighth event of 2024.

Gateway was moved to a primetime TV slot, becoming the first IndyCar race to be scheduled on a Sunday night. IndyCar has now averaged over one million viewers through three straight races. The series had previously achieved this feat twice since 2016.